Weâ€™ve created more than 800 content campaigns at Fractl over the years, and weâ€™d be lying if we told you every single one was a hit.

The Internet is a finicky place. You canâ€™t predict with 100% accuracy if your content will perform well. Sometimes what we think is going to do OK ends up being a massive hit. And there have been a few instances where weâ€™d expect a campaign to be a huge success but it went on to garner lackluster results.

While you canâ€™t control the whims of the Internet, you can avoid or include certain things in your content to help your chances of success. Through careful analysis weâ€™ve pinpointed which factors tend to create high-performing content. Similarly, weâ€™ve identified trends among our content that didnâ€™t quite hit the mark.

In this this post, Iâ€™ll share our most valuable lessons we learned from content flops. Bear in mind this advice applies if youâ€™re using content to earn links and press pickups, which is what the majority of the content we create at Fractl aims to do.

It’s hardly surprising that Google Home is an extension of Google’s search ecosystem. Home is attempting to answer more and more questions, drawing those answers from search results. There’s an increasingly clear connection between Featured Snippets in search and voice answers.

For example, let’s say a hedgehog wanders into your house and you naturally find yourself wondering what you should feed it. You might search for “What do hedgehogs eat?” On desktop, you’d see a Featured Snippet like the following:

Given that you’re trying to wrangle a strange hedgehog, searching on your desktop may not be practical, so you ask Google Home: “Ok, Google â€” What do hedgehogs eat?” and hear the following:

Google Home leads with the attribution to Ark Wildlife (since a voice answer has no direct link), and then repeats a short version of the desktop snippet. The connection between the two answers is, I hope, obvious.

Anecdotally, this is a pattern we see often on Google Home, but how consistent is it? How does Google handle Featured Snippets in other formats (including lists and tables)? Are some questions answered wildly differently by Google Home compared to desktop search?

The Fractl team has worked on hundreds of content marketing projects. Along the way, weâ€™ve kept track of a lot of data, including everywhere our client campaigns have been featured, what types of links each campaign attracted, and how many times each placement was shared.

While we regularly look back on our data to evaluate performance per campaign and client, until now weâ€™d never analyzed all of these data in aggregate. After combing through 31,000 media mentions and 26,000 links, hereâ€™s what we found.

Most high-authority links donâ€™t receive a lot of social shares.

Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority sites, the shares will come. In a Whiteboard Friday from last year, Rand talks about this trend. BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed 1 million articles and found that over 75 percent received no social shares at all. When they looked at all links â€“ not just articles â€“ this number rose to around 90 percent.

We (wrongfully) assumed this wouldnâ€™t be the case with high-quality links weâ€™ve earned. It turns out, even the majority of our links on sites with a high Domain Authority (DA) didnâ€™t get any social shares:

Okay, so Starbucks isnâ€™t exactly hosting a presentation on â€śSocial Media 101,â€ť but if you watch carefully, there any many companies that are excelling with social media in ways that you easily can too. Large corporations often have expansive budgets and resources for their social media efforts that small businesses donâ€™t have access to. However, smaller companies, especially those just starting out, can watch, analyze, and learn from these social media giants. Replicating strategies is a great way to take advantage of their large budgets and downscale them to something that works for you. These are three companies you should be taking lessons from and why.

Staples

Staples has an endearing social media strategy that allows you to truly connect with them. When you scroll through their feed, it feels like they â€śgetâ€ť you. Youâ€™ll laugh at their humor, appreciate their philanthropic efforts, and be inspired by their creativity. For example, on the 4th of July they created a video of … Read the rest

Bands, music, and SEO – A different paradigm

For B2B or ecommerce, people oftendiscover your brand with commercial queries like ”dining room lamps” or an informational search like “how to fix a dishwasher”.

Then they look around your site, your social profiles, get retargetedâ€”before ever making a purchaseâ€”but in many cases that journey started with an non-branded organic search. Search is certainly not theonly discovery channel. But important enough that investment in non-branded keywords is essential.

A (very simplified) illustration of this discovery path might look something like this:

The above is NOT the case for musicians and bands though.When’s the last time you discovered a band with a search engine?Probably never.

For bands and musicians, the discovery path is flipped around. THIS is probably more realistic:

The search engine is more about reducing friction on the path to becoming a die-hard fan. I don’t think many people are discovering their new favorite band like this:

But you HAVE probably tried to learn more about bands and musiciansafter the initial discovery with searches like this:

(No, I am not a Lumineers fanâ€”just so there’s no confusion )

I don’t think many musicians, bands, record labels or managers are looking at … Read the rest